2026-07-10 –, The Seedbed
What does it take for a community to design and build their digital tools?
This talk is thought to bring reflections on what we talk about when we talk about sovereign digital tools, and the characteristics of a community that host the flourishing of such technologies. We'll present an example in Brazilian context, and open a little space for discussions on the topic.
Within the open agtech community, we try to think how to build technologies with communities, rather than for them. Thus, we ask ourselves: how are those communities organized, and what social aspects creates conditions to make the work of building and maintaining their digital tools? And then, when we have built some very good tool, and we want to make it a common resource, how do we make it so that the new adopters can also own this tools, and share the responsibilities around it?
In the process of replicating the tools we make, we want to respect diversity of contexts and make it so that the communities themselves build their tool. What we want to do is facilitate their building process and that's how we believe we'll enhance sovereignty, in a way that's de-colonial, anti-imperialistic and challenges power dynamics.
So, for this short talk, I propose to share our reflections on these themes, using a experience in Brazilian context, and host a brief discussion for collecting participants thoughts.
With an electrical engineering background, Nádia transitioned to the agtech field through photovoltaic irrigation systems. In contact with organic farmers and brazilian agroecological movement, she started to orient her perspective towards digital systems that support collective work, while diving in the hacker culture and politics. She lives in a small farm in southeast Brazil.